Does the FLAC audio format have multiple quality settings?

Question

I am writing an encoding software and dealing with uncompressed wav and flac formats. My question is, flac is supposed to be a lossless format, similar to wav but compressed. However, certain softwares such as JRiver's Media Center offer a 'quality' setting for encoding flac files. Does taht mean they are offering to reduce quality pre-encoding or am i missing something in the flac standard?

Answer 1

The quality parameter for FLAC refers to the quality of compression, not audio. The audio will stay lossless but you get a better compression with higher quality. Higher quality will take more time to compress however.

See docs http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Encoding_Settings

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC): FLAC is a popular lossless, freely available open source encoder. [2] Quality Settings: 0 - 8. Sets the quality of compression (and not sound, which is lossless), 8 meaning most compressed/time/effort.